Here’s a little tip I would like to relate: big fish bites if ya got a good bait

I think that might have been a perfect dinner, just now, that thrown-together bunch of salads, that sort-of Maine spring Nicoise. In fact, I almost don’t want to write about it, it was so good, and all the tastes are still lingering on my tongue, garlic and fish and asparagus and potato and capers. But of course the need to write about food, mixed either with memory or desire, is almost as strong as my love of eating, so here goes:

At the local market this morning, after our hike on the Eastern Prom along the blue bay on the green bluffs in the liquid sunlight and dewy air, past blossoming trees and unfurling ferns and lush grass, we bought asparagus and chives, pea shoots and arugula.

We took another hike this afternoon, on another path along another bluff, in more gold liquid sunlight and fresh barely-warm air, past a ruined stone villa in a copse, crumbled forts and batteries, and the oldest lighthouse in Maine, watching small birds ride the swells where the waves crashed into the seaweedy rocky shore, stopping to sit on a stone wall so Dingo could loll in a patch of tender young dandelions like an odalisque, prompting us to call him Dingolion and Dandelingo because we were totally loopy with the beauty of it all, high on it in fact.

Afterwards, at home, while Brendan fed Dingo and opened a bottle of cold Orvieto, I washed four Yukon Gold potatoes and put them on to boil and trimmed this morning’s asparagus and put it on to steam, feeding a few of the ends to Dingo, who considers them delicacies on a par with anything in the world. I chopped the quarter head of radicchio and the endive that were in the fridge and put them into a big salad bowl with a handful each of pea shoots and arugula.

I made a sauce for the asparagus and potatoes: two generous tablespoons of Hain mayonnaise plus the juice of one juicy lemon, a big handful of minced chives, 3 garlic cloves, minced, white wine vinegar, olive oil, and a lot of black pepper.

When the asparagus was just steamed, I cut it coarsely into bite-sized pieces and let them cool on the cutting board. When the potatoes were just tender, I quartered them lengthwise and tossed them in a vinegar bath, equal parts apple cider and white wine, and let them marinate and cool in the fridge, for 15 minutes.

The crisp salad was tossed in the following dressing: olive oil, white wine vinegar, garlic, mustard, a few drips of honey, black pepper.

I divided the asparagus between two plates, then opened a can of wild Alaskan pink salmon and divided it likewise, then drizzled the fish and the asparagus in some of the chive-lemon-garlic-mayonnaise dressing. I drained the vinegar-soaked, cooled potatoes and tossed them in the rest of the mayonnaise dressing with two minced celery stalks and dished it out, threw a handful of capers over the potatoes and the fish, dusted the potato salad with smoked paprika, then put the dressed salad alongside everything else.

We sat at the counter, a little sunburned, relaxed from all the exercise in the fresh clean air. We listened to Edith Piaf and ate every scrap of everything while we sipped the crisp, barely-fruity wine. Dingo sprawled at our feet, too sacked out to beg.

It’s so good to be home. I just finished a three-week book tour to promote the paperback of “Blue Plate Special:” airports and airplanes and hotels and cities and taxis and old people I love and new people I love, eating meals on the fly, standing up in front of people and reading and talking, waking up early in the morning. I was thrown off-kilter in the manner of all homebody/introverts taken out of their routine, but I felt exhilarated and grateful and lucky the entire time.

Now that I’m home, I’m writing a new book, and when that’s done, I have two more stacked in the air behind it, waiting to land. The cycle of the writing life, the flushed anxiety of starting something new and the deeply introverted work of getting it out and the nervy excitement of revising and the extroverted pleasure of selling and promoting it and then starting all over again at the very beginning, never ends, if you’re lucky, and nothing is harder or more pleasurable or more meaningful or more scary or more thrilling, and so forth, until you die. If you’re lucky.

Anyway, it was a relief today to let my mind becalm itself as I sat in the sun on the wall leaning against Brendan, Dingo on his back in the dandelions next to us. Across the bay, old summerhouses sat cozily on an island in green scrub atop rocky cliffs. We watched a fishing trawler, a blue, trim, old-style boat with a short mast, chug past the islands to the mouth of the harbor, beyond the lighthouse, out to sea, to catch – what? Smelts? What’s left out there now? We chewed on that for a while.

Thank you for for putting words to your sex-fantasy conundrum in the Elle article. For the first time in my life I felt relief & less shame in knowing I’m not the only one. And when I shared it with a friend of mine, she (so shockingly!) has the same experience. Wow. Your words have changed my life!

Kate, I am so grateful to be able to simply click on your website and have this quality of writing at my fingertips. You are the only author besides Annie Dillard whose books and essays I have enjoyed reading multiple times. Truly we are lucky folks! Thank you.